PREPARATION

I Was Just Thinking About – PREPARATION.

Holiday periods are unique. The period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day are steeped with maintaining of family traditions and all of the planning and temporal preparation as individual celebrations take place. Merchants plan well ahead of this time of year because it is when their sales and revenues peak at their highest for the entire year.

While it is within one’s own personal radar that certain things will happen routinely during this period, there is always the last minute desperate seeking for that one more additional item. There is no concern for the cost per se – just the sense of wanting or needing it.

Spiritual preparation for Thanksgiving should have the obvious recognition that Psalm 100:4-5 (NLT) be part of our celebration inasmuch as we are directed to: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. For the LORD is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.”

In a similar way at Christmas, we should prepare to include the echoing of music sung by the angels – Luke 2:13-14 (NLT), “Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying, Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”

A final area of preparation is sometimes the one that is least attended to and that is in terms of where one will spend eternity. The clearly stated reason for the coming and birth of Jesus Christ is summarized in Galatians 4:4-5 where it states He came to redeem and to adopt a people who would be privileged to come before Almighty God and address Him as “Abba, Father.”

In the Old Testament, there was a time when the Lord sent all kinds of signs and warnings to get the people to return to Him – yet the people ignore them all. It reaches a climax in Amos 4:12-13, when God declares He will be ignored no longer. The signs and warnings will become the people’s reality – “Therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel; because I will do this to you, PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD, O Israel! For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth—the LORD, the God of hosts, is his name! Have you – are you - prepared to meet your God?

Prayerfully – remember and consider these things with me!